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Did Unilateral Divorce Raise Divorce Rates? Evidence from Panel Data

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Author Info
Leora Friedberg
Abstract

This paper revisits the evidence on the impact of unilateral divorce laws on divorce rates in the United States. Most states switched from requiring mutual consent to allowing unilateral or no-fault divorce between 1970 and 1985, while the national divorce rate more than doubled after 1965. According to the Coase theorem, however, the legal shift should have had no effect on divorce rates. Recent papers using cross-sectional micro data have disputed the empirical importance of unilateral divorce, disagreeing in particular about controls for state-level heterogeneity in divorce propensities. This paper uses a panel of state-level divorce rates which includes virtually every divorce in the U.S. over the entire period of the law changes. Adding comprehensive controls - year and state fixed effects and state fixed trends - for changing unobservable divorce propensities reveals that the divorce rate would have been about 6% lower if states had not switched to unilateral divorce, accounting for 17% of the increase in the divorce rate between 1968 and 1988. Additional results in this paper demonstrate that the type of unilateral divorce law that states adopted matters. Weaker versions of unilateral divorce, which retain elements of mutual divorce, raised the divorce rate significantly, but by less than the strongest versions of unilateral divorce did.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 6398.

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Date of creation: Feb 1998
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Publication status: published as American Economic Review, Vol. 88, no. 3 (June 1998): 608-627.
Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:6398

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
J12 - Labor and Demographic Economics - - Demographic Economics - - - Marriage; Marital Dissolution; Family Structure
K39 - Law and Economics - - Other Substantive Areas of Law - - - Other

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(explanations, Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.)

  1. Sonia Oreffice, 2003. "Abortion and Female Power in the Household Evidence from Labor Supply," Working Papers 2003.41, Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei. [Downloadable!]
  2. Ellwood, David T. & Jencks, Christopher, 2004. "The Spread of Single-Parent Families in the United States since 1960," Working Paper Series rwp04-008, Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government. [Downloadable!]
  3. Stacy Dickert-Conlin & Cristian Meghea, 2004. "The Effect Of Social Security On Divorce And Remarriage Behavior," Working Papers, Center for Retirement Research at Boston College 2004-09, Center for Retirement Research. [Downloadable!]
  4. Graziella Bertocchi, 2008. "The Enfranchisement of Women and the Welfare State," Center for Economic Research (RECent) 018, University of Modena and Reggio E., Dept. of Economics. [Downloadable!]
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  5. Pierre-André Chiappori & Murat Iyigun & Yoram Weiss, 2007. "Public Goods, Transferable Utility and Divorce Laws," IZA Discussion Papers 2646, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
  6. Cáceres-Delpiano, Julio & Giolito, Eugenio P., 2008. "How Unilateral Divorce Affects Children," IZA Discussion Papers 3342, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
  7. Stevenson, Betsey & Wolfers, Justin, 2003. "Bargaining in the Shadow of the Law: Divorce Laws and Family Distress," Research Papers 1828, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. [Downloadable!]
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  8. Marianne E. Page & Ann Huff Stevens, 2002. "Will You Miss Me When I Am Gone? The Economic Consequences of Absent Parents," NBER Working Papers 8786, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  9. Dirk Bethmann & Michael Kvasnicka, 2005. "Paternal Uncertainty and the Economics of Mating, Marriage, and Parental Investment in Children," SFB 649 Discussion Papers SFB649DP2005-046, Sonderforschungsbereich 649, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. [Downloadable!]
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  10. Libertad González Luna & Tarja K. Viitanen, 2006. "The Effect of Divorce Laws on Divorce Rates in Europe," Economics Working Papers 986, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. [Downloadable!]
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  11. Jonathan Gruber, 2000. "Is Making Divorce Easier Bad for Children? The Long Run Implications of Unilateral Divorce," NBER Working Papers 7968, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  12. Libertad González Luna & Tarja Viitanen, 2008. "The Long Term Effects of Legalizing Divorce on Children," Economics Working Papers 1122, Department of Economics and Business, Universitat Pompeu Fabra. [Downloadable!]
  13. Boeri, Tito & Macis, Mario, 2008. "Do Unemployment Benefits Promote or Hinder Structural Change?," IZA Discussion Papers 3371, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
  14. Heather Antecol & Kelly Bedard, 2002. "Does Single Parenthood Increase the Probability of Teenage Promiscuity, Drug Use and Crime?," Claremont Colleges Working Papers 2002-23, Claremont Colleges. [Downloadable!]
  15. Antonio Nicolò & Piero Tedeschi, 2006. "Missing Contracts: On the Rationality of not Signing a Prenuptial Agreement," Working Papers 20060506, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca, Dipartimento di Statistica. [Downloadable!]
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  16. Heather Antecol & Kelly Bedard & Eric Helland, 2001. "Does Single Parenthood Increase the Probability of Teenage Promiscuity, Drug Use, and Crime? Evidence from Divorce Law Changes," University of California at Santa Barbara, Economics Working Paper Series 8-02, Department of Economics, UC Santa Barbara. [Downloadable!]
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  17. Jeremy Greenwood & Nezih Guner, 2004. "Marriage and Divorce since World War II: Analyzing the Role of Technological Progress on the Formation of Households," Economie d'Avant Garde Research Reports 8, Economie d'Avant Garde, revised Apr 2008. [Downloadable!]
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  18. Gonzalez, Libertad & Viitanen, Tarja, 2008. "The Long Term Effects of Legalizing Divorce on Children," IZA Discussion Papers 3789, Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA). [Downloadable!]
  19. Wolfers, Justin, 2003. "Did Unilateral Divorce Laws Raise Divorce Rates? A Reconciliation and New Results," Research Papers 1819, Stanford University, Graduate School of Business. [Downloadable!]
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  20. Christopher Carpenter, 2007. "How Do Workplace Smoking Laws Work? Quasi-Experimental Evidence from Local Laws in Ontario, Canada," NBER Working Papers 13133, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
  21. Betsey Stevenson, 2008. "Divorce Law and Women's Labor Supply," NBER Working Papers 14346, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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